Empirical articleThe Effects of Prequestions versus Postquestions on Memory Retention in Children
Section snippets
Participants
Thirty-three children were initially recruited. Six children who did not show up for the second session of the experiment had their data excluded from the analysis. The remaining 27 children were 10.72 years old on average (SD = 0.4, 16 females) and were enrolled in the fifth grade of a private school in southeastern Brazil. Informed consent was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Federal University of Minas Gerais and by the children’s parents.
Materials
The stimulus-material consisted of a
Method
Except where noted, the method is identical to Experiment 1.
General Discussion
In two experiments, prequestions and postquestions were more beneficial for learning in elementary school children than restudy. Postquestions were more beneficial than prequestions when the delayed final test was a cued recall test. When the final test was a multiple choice test, however, both prequestions and postquestions showed equivalent benefits in comparison to restudy. Confidence on the multiple choice responses were higher for previously postquestioned, followed by prequestioned, and
Author Contributions
Natália Klik de Lima, conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, interpreted the data, and wrote the paper.
Antônio Jaeger, conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, and interpreted the data, and wrote the paper.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino, with support from the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq, Grant # 465686/2014-1), the São Paulo Research Foundation (Grant # 2014/50909-8), and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES, Grant # 88887.136407/2017-00). This work was also supported by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG, Grant # APQ-01174-14), and by
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Author Note
Natália Klik de Lima, Department of Psychology, Federal University of Minas Gerais,Antonio Carlos Avenue, 6627, Belo Horizonte, MG, 31270-901, Brazil.
Antônio Jaeger, Department of Psychology, Federal University of Minas Gerais, and Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino, Brazil.